When Kaiserpunk was announced a couple of years ago, I couldn’t contain my excitement. Having played numerous strategy games in the past, the notion of combining concepts from city-building management sims, 4X strategy, and grand warfare, all wrapped up in an alternate post-World War I timeline, seemed too good to be true.
Regrettably, it surely is. Having played Kaiserpunk for roughly 15 hours, this offering from Overseer Games initially shows promise, though it’s bogged down by several glaring flaws with its UI, core mechanics, and general progression.
Kaiserpunk is set in an alternate post-World War I time period where survivors have risen from the devastation to form their own city-states across the world. While there are several options of different regions to choose from, there’s an almost Eurocentric focus. Just imagine my surprise when I thought I could play as my home country, the Philippines, only to realize that the four options in South Asia and Southeast Asia were for locations in India and Indonesia only. Europe, meanwhile, has close to two dozen map options.
Regardless of your decision, there’s still very little to differentiate your chosen region/nation outside of the “heritage” that you choose at the start of the campaign. Think of it as akin to passive bonuses with one drawback, such as having improvements to scientific developments and agricultural output at the cost of lower military production speed.
As for the city-building aspect, this is where Kaiserpunk initially shines. The mechanics should feel familiar to anyone who’s played logistics/management sims like the Anno or Tropico series. You start with just a town center, and you have to construct various residences, production facilities, mines, farms, and amenities, all to satisfy the needs of citizens. All roads must lead to the town center, too, and you have to create side streets and pathways to improve logistical throughput. It’s a good idea to have clusters of facilities that are part of the same production chain, such as farms, bakeries, and flour mills, plopped down next to each other to speed up the manufacturing process.
All in all, this core concept where you start from scratch, plan the layout of your city, and gain new citizens from laborers to specialists, while watching your burgeoning settlement turn into a sprawling metropolis, is so thoroughly engaging that I found myself playing for hours just to see my capital’s continued development.
Perhaps my only gripes here are related to the logistical radius and the game’s UI/UX. Regional maps are huge, and numerous resource nodes dot the countryside. Evidently, you have to place mines and other buildings to gather those resources. But these, too, require additional depots and infrastructure (i.e., power stations or water towers), not to mention extra laborers. A larger effective radius for utility and logistics buildings would alleviate intensive micromanagement. As for the UI/UX, this facet surely needs a few tweaks — upgrade icons are so tiny that I have to squint just to read descriptions, and notification tooltips regarding issues aren’t particularly clear either.
Where Kaiserpunk woefully falters is in its transition from city builder/management sim to grand strategy warfare. Firstly, it’s because trying to get your armies up and running — not to mention your navy and air force — is a painstaking and arduous task. You need to have enough unemployed citizens, as well as extra resources to manufacture military rations and equipment, just to train a single unit. When you do encounter problems, the game’s tooltips aren’t quite clear about what caused them in the first place. At one point, I knew I had a surplus of wheat and bread, so I built a factory that made rations. I couldn’t tell for certain if it used up all the bread I had, but whatever I did caused my citizens to grow hungry due to a lack of food.
Secondly, warmongering and diplomatic options are about as bare-bones as they could get. For the most part, you attack adjacent regions with your armies in fairly simplistic combat encounters. You also need to ensure that you advance with multiple units in your battalion; not engaging with overwhelming force almost certainly leads to defeat, which means waiting until your units are finished with cooldown and in tip-top condition again. The poor execution is more akin to a board game like Risk, as opposed to a title with strategic depth like Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis.
Thirdly, the overall development of your region takes so long that you’re unlikely to build ships and planes until you’re several hours into your campaign. So, if you somehow need to cross the sea before then, you need the proper facilities and related scientific improvements. It’s a mind-boggling design decision given the setting. It’s as though World War I was a “swords to ploughshares” reset for the entire human race, and everyone suddenly forgot how to make armaments and military transports.
But perhaps the most glaring flaw of Kaiserpunk is that you don’t necessarily feel that you’re working toward a goal or objective. 4X strategy series like Civilization and Age of Wonders have unique victory conditions, whereas grand strategy titles from Paradox Interactive have events and requirements that lead to enforcing debilitating demands upon your foes, restoring your nation’s prestige, or unifying a fractured empire. In Kaiserpunk’s sandbox campaign, I mostly just recruited units, sent them over to nearby territories, hoped that they’d win battles, and moved on to the next region. It’s conquest for the sake of conquest, minus the engrossing “one more turn” (or “one more hour”) aspect.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how the endgame section of your Kaiserpunk campaigns will go. This is a single-player game and, other than minor factions that hold single regions, you can choose to battle up to seven AI-controlled leaders. However, since the sandbox takes place on the world map — emphasis on world, since you can’t change the map size, make custom maps, or interact with minor factions — you end up having to scour the whole planet just to finish off your opponents. This makes future playthroughs egregiously tedious and repetitive to a fault.
Ultimately, the Kaiserpunk team tried its hand at presenting a mishmash of genres, but the resultant game is a jack of all trades without excelling in any individual facet. That said, if you’re looking for a game that combines warfare and strategy with other aspects, like role-playing or management, then you might be better off playing titles like Crusader Kings 3, Mount & Blade, or Manor Lords. A take on the modern era, sadly, will just have to wait.
Kaiserpunk was released March 21 on Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC using a copy provided by Overseer Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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